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“Foundation For Freedom Online” founder Mike Benz discusses Arizona State University’s federally funded “multi-million dollar censorship center” researching disinformation online during an appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast.

“They’re saying the simple act of ‘diminishing public faith and confidence’ in the news media, government, and science is an attack on democracy,” Benz said. “The purpose of the program is to protect their assets. And legacy news media is one of those assets.”

“If you on social media undermine public faith in the New York Times as a credible institution, you are attacking democracy, and the white blood cells of the blob, these disinformation centers being run out of our NGOs and universities and for-profit private sector, censorship mercenary firms, will scan and ban you off the internet.”

“The ghost of John McCain, the founder of the CIA side of the GOP… has been caught basically conflating anything that’s pro-Trump with being pro-Russia and going after rank-and-file right-wing populists and conservatives because that’s who the never-Trump side of the GOP — the Mitt Romney, John McCain side of the GOP — is trying to take out.”

MIKE BENZ: Harvard’s misinformation review, disinformation studies is “too big to fail.” They’re so deeply ingrained in the private sector interstitials, working with all the trust and safety people at every platform. They’re so deeply funded by 12 different government departments and 50 different government programs. There’s no way to get rid of us even if you want to.That’s what they were stunting on, right before Elon Musk finished the acquisition of X and Republicans won the House in 2022. And all this went in reverse. And now you’ll see just this, you know, just this week in the news that there, you know, there are quotes about them wanting to flee the country and that the whole field is potentially in disarray if Trump does indeed go forward and defund this, because now you’re going to have 100 university centers gone. There goes your State Department funding. There goes your NSF funding.

And I have a great example of that, by the way, that’s pretty eye-opening on our topic of institutions. That’s a that’s a quick receipt, if you’re interested.

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Jamie, if you go to the Arizona State University Global Security Initiative, I’m going to show you some of this in action a little bit… Google “Arizona State University Center on narrative disinformation and strategic influence.”

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Arizona State University is basically John McCain University. Now, this is significant because John McCain was the founding president of the IRI (International Republican Institute).

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Arizona State University, its current president, Michael Crow, is now and has been since the day it was born in 1999, the chairman of In-Q-Tel. In-Q-Tel is the CIA’s venture capital arm. This is literally the CIA’s proprietary investments in early-stage technology companies. And the head of Arizona State University, its president, is the chairman of In-Q-Tel. And has been for 25 years.

Arizona State University has these very deep partnerships with John McCain, who was the senator from Arizona. John McCain, who ran for president against Barack Obama in 2008, was the, before he ran for president in 2008, for 25 years, he was the founder and the president of the IRI, the CIA wing of the Republican Party. Again, the IRI is that, is the GOP side of the National Endowment For Democracy. That’s effectively a self-declared CIA cutout. And in fact, Arizona State University has a John McCain Center on disinformation that that that works in tandem with this one. But I just wanted to show that you’ll see this is technically it’s Arizona State University, but you’ll see that it is an Intelligence program…..

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